In forests worldwide, drought consistently has had a more detrimental impact on the growth and survival of larger trees, new research shows. In addition, while the death of small trees may affect the dominance of trees in a landscape, the death of large trees has a far worse impact on the ecosystem and climate’s health, especially due to the important […]
Read more
Chikungunya is a serious health threat. Mosquitoes once limited to tropical I regions are spreading north to the U.S., carrying both dengue fever and Chikungunya, a virus that causes fever, chills, headache, and punishing joint pain that can persist for years. Once a relatively obscure illness limited mostly to Africa, Chikungunya (pronounced chicken gunya) has transformed over the past decade […]
Read more
At least half of the world’s killer whales will become extinct because of toxic waste in the oceans within the next century according to researchers. Some areas despite efforts to control the pollutants of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) still remain at high levels. Research scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) are saying that if we don’t bring down the […]
Read more
European researchers have once again warned that the thinning of the Antarctic ice shelf means that the flow of glaciers on the frozen continent could accelerate, with a consequent rise in sea levels. They examine, in two separate studies, the increasingly precarious state of some of the ice shelf. When the shelf, consisting of ice floating on the ocean, melts, […]
Read more
A bright blue dwarf snakehead fish that can wriggle around on land for up to four days at a time and a snub-nosed monkey that sneezes when it rains: Those are just two of 211 new species found over the past five years in the Eastern Himalayas, the World Wildlife Federation reports. The region, which spans central Nepal, Myanmar, and […]
Read more
The newest professor in the University of Rhode Island’s College of the Environment and Life Sciences, Hollie Putnam, thinks some corals and shellfish might have good enough “memories” to buffer the changes in ocean chemistry that are resulting from the effects of climate change on coral reefs. A native of Minnesota who earned a doctorate at the University of Hawaii, […]
Read more
Some new thinking may have brought astronomers a step closer to solving the mystery of how our moon formed. Researchers have long believed that the moon was cleaved from a Mars-sized planet that collided with Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. Yet recent tests of lunar rock samples suggest that the moon’s chemical makeup is too similar to Earth’s to […]
Read more
With temperatures in excess of 800 F, Mercury is one of the last places in the solar system you’d expect to find ice. But when NASA’s Messenger spacecraft transmitted its first optical images of the closest planets to the sun, that’s exactly what scientists discovered. Mercury sits about 36 million miles from the sun, which is roughly 57 million miles […]
Read more
Climatologists found that the carbon dioxide levels have risen so high that they could have catastrophic consequences to our life on the planet earth. Prior to the 18th century the levels were averaging about 280 ppm (parts per million). The Industrial Revolution began burning fossil fuels which sent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They are predicting that our carbon […]
Read more
Until recently, Pakistan has not used the bulk of its coal reserves – some of the largest in the world – for power generation. Within the past year the government in Islamabad has signed a number of financial and technological agreements with China aimed at exploiting massive coal reserves at the Tharparkar mine in Sindh province, in the south of the […]
Read more